Cursed Arrows share their album, Crone on bubblegum pink and mint green cassette tapes + digitally
Nova Scotia-based duo, Cursed Arrows have unveiled their nine-song release, Crone. The collection of tunes is now available on bubblegum pink and mint green cassette tapes, as well as digitally.
The cassettes were released via Barrie, ON-based punk label, Tarantula Tapes.
Listen to Crone below and learn more about Cursed Arrows via our Five Questions With segment.
Care to introduce yourself to our readers?
We are Jackie and Ryan, partners in music and in love. We are approaching our 20th anniversary of doing…everything together (June 14th)!
We make all-over-the-map music together, but the umbrella of Cursed Arrows has grown to encompass some of our other outputs: Ryan’s artwork, my jewelery, and most recently we created an oracle deck.
Tell us a bit about your most recent release.
CRONE was unintentionally our lockdown album. We’d been playing as a four-piece band since 2019 and anticipated working on this record with two other musicians, but the pandemic coaxed us back into doing things the way we always had: as a duo. We’d take turns recording guitar tracks, drums, and vocals in our living room, while one of us played with our son in the backyard. Our brilliant friend Nick Johannes played bass on several songs remotely and sent us over the tracks. His bass parts have so much presence and are unlike anything we’d have come up with ourselves.
Listening to the album, though, I don’t think that context is apparent at all. It’s our most polished, studio-sounding record to date. We’ve used all the same technology for recording for at least a decade. The same mics, 80’s Pearl exports, Reaper DAW – even the same monstrous old PC! But we were gifted a Rickenbacker and an SG by the friendly cosmos and we bought ourselves Butch Vig Vocals to use this time around. We also had time on our side, which was especially helpful in mixing and mastering the album ourselves.
Those few crucial changes – along with the confidence we felt coming off of a few shows with a full band – made this the record we are most proud of. We can listen to it through a phone or a TV or car stereo or headphones and it always sounds exactly the way we intended. We’re also totally honoured to have had the killer punk label Tarantula Tapes put out the cassette version of this record with us.
Where do you tend to pull inspiration from when writing?
Musically, our decades spent listening to PJ Harvey’s long-range evolution, and youthful obsessions with Fugazi, Pixies, and Sonic Youth, become apparent on CRONE.
We used to write a lot of topical songs, but nothing on CRONE comes close to this except for Empty Handed, which I (Jackie) came up with alone during the massive 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. I’ve written a lot of lyrics about criminal justice reform in the past, and these issues were really coming to a head (yet again) in the mainstream worldwide as we finished up writing this record.
Overall, Ryan and I wrote a more personal album than we normally do, focused on solutions rather than the problems themselves. In “Matter Is An Illusion,” Ryan’s expressing his personal ethos about how to maintain psychological homeostasis: it’s about not listening to the evil voices in your head. They’re an illusion; don’t pay them any mind. When you make progress and then backslide, that’s ok! Just regain composure and rejoin yourself wherever you left off.
Slithering Crones, where the album title comes from, is a sneaky attempt at describing my own way of viewing the world:
Dress for the death of your past
Refuse to give up
Let those moments of weakness
Stay moments
Do you have any upcoming shows you’d like to tell us about?
Yes, indeed!
We are performing in Halifax, NS at Propeller Arcade on May 26, and in Dartmouth, NS at Woodside Tavern on June 10.
What’s your goal for 2023?
Our goals are to stay healthy and spiritually sound for the entire year, having lots of adventures with our kid, all while making as many music videos – and smiling at as many people – as possible.